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Proxy Monitor 2015 Conference

The Manhattan Institute cordially invites you to its fifth annual Proxy Monitor conference, featuring New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who will join us for an exclusive interview with James Copland, director of M.I.’s Center for Legal Policy. Elected in 2013, Comptroller Stringer made his mark this proxy season with the most broadly successful shareholder campaign ever launched by a single public-pension system. In 2015, NYC pension funds’ Boardroom Accountability Project sponsored shareholder proposals at 75 publicly traded companies, seeking “proxy-access” rules which would grant long-term shareholders the right, under certain conditions, to nominate candidates for company director without a formal proxy fight. Among those proposals introduced at companies in M.I.’s ProxyMonitor.org database that have come to a vote, 82 percent received majority shareholder support.

Proxy Monitor 2015 featured the release of two M.I. research papers: Copland’s 2015 proxy-season review and a groundbreaking empirical study, by Professor Tracie Woidtke of the University of Tennessee, on the relationship between shareholder-proposal activism by state and municipal pension funds and shareholder value. Copland and Woidtke will discuss their findings as well as new regulatory and legal actions in securities law and corporate governance, including challenges to the SEC’s rules on “conflicting proposals” and “ordinary business exceptions,” in a panel moderated by M.I.’s Margaret O’Keefe.